Bob Stumpel on the privacy issues of location based services

Editors note: Bob Stumpel had some reflections during SIME Finland on how privacy is a big issue but people are more afraid than they perhaps need to be of getting their data like location and contact details exploited. The following is some extended thoughts on the subject published on the Belysio blog by Bob. Belysio is a location based mobile social network with finegrained privacy controls. /Andie Nordgren

Belysio and the Privacy Controversy regarding LBS

I’m a promiscuous digital networker. I’m participating, more or less actively, in about 10 social networks (and doing research for my Everything 2.0 index, I’ve registered to hundreds more). Everywhere I’ve submitted my real name, my real contact data, and (wherever I took the trouble) a real photo. And now that I use Belysio, 24/7, I’m also abundantly sharing my whereabouts.
Am I in danger now? Will people break in at my office when they see that I’m abroad, or will a burglar do some fun shopping in my living room when he sees I’m in a business meeting in the next city? Do the approximately thousands of people that I’ve shared my data with on Xing, LinkedIn, Facebook or Belysio spam me with unwanted messages? Will phishers steal my credit card data? Will people steal my identity?

I don’t think so. I think being totally transparent, and being as generous in sharing data as I can, will be rewarded by people giving me back the same, or even more of it. (In the 4 years that I’ve been part of Xing and LinkedIn I’ve never traced even one spam message from somebody with whom I shared my emaill address!).
Do I think that everybody should behave as abundantly “open” as I do? Definitely not. Kids shouldn’t, full stop. Women should always be more careful than men. If your boss tracks you through any location service, he’d better have a very good business reason for it, that you can endorse.

Everybody should be able to tweak their privacy settings to the exact level they feel comfortable with, under all feasible circumstances.

Belysio seems to comply to all criteria in this LBS Privacy model

That facility to tweak your privacy settings is one of the things that Belysio is excellent in. They’ve defined privacy protection as one of their core competencies. But what’s more, every time I log in, they take care of making me aware of the fact that I’m sharing something sensitive if I share my location, by asking me to opt in to either sharing it with no one, my family, my friends, my other contacts, or strangers. Furthermore, they’re offering me a whole set of features to calibrate my “openness”, up to extremely granular, social and circumstancial levels.

There may, however, be some privacy matters that Belysio has overseen. Do you see any room for improvements?